Army Career Behind Him, General Speaks Out on Iraq
By THOM SHANKER
ROCHESTER, May 10 — John Batiste has traveled a long way in the last four years, from commanding the First Infantry Division in Iraq to quitting the Army after three decades in uniform and, now, from his new life overseeing a steel factory here, to openly challenging President Bush on his management of the war.
“Mr. President, you did not listen,” General Batiste says in new television advertisements being broadcast in Republican Congressional districts as part of a $500,000 campaign financed by VoteVets.org. “You continue to pursue a failed strategy that is breaking our great Army and Marine Corps. I left the Army in protest in order to speak out. Mr. President, you have placed our nation in peril. Our only hope is that Congress will act now to protect our fighting men and women.”
Those are powerful, inflammatory words from General Batiste, a retired major general who spent 31 years in the Army, a profession sworn to unflinching loyalty to civilian control of the military. Many senior officers say privately that talk like this makes them uncomfortable; when you pin that first star on your shoulder, they say, your first name becomes “General” for the rest of your life.
But General Batiste says he has received no phone calls, letters or messages from current or former officers challenging his public stance, although he occasionally gets an anonymous e-mail message with the heading “Traitor.” Having quit the Army in anger at what he calls mismanagement of the Iraq war, he says he chose a second career far from Washington and the Pentagon so that he could speak freely on military issues.
“I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans,” General Batiste said over sandwiches in a blue-collar diner here. “I am a lifelong Republican. But it is past time for change.”
...
Retired General Speaks of Iraq Mismanagement
go to original
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hey Ken,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. It is truly troubling how the MIC has grown into a synergy with the Federal Government.
I sympathize with your view of an eventual collapse and subsequent re-ordering. I think that may be what is required to set the house straight.
There is so much momentum in the current system. I don't know how it can be stopped short of its own self-destruction. But it will self destruct.
That's both heartening and dreadful at the same time.
I am interested in creating an alternative society so as to facilitate non-participation with the current system.
Because in a lot of ways, I think we have already reached system failure. Society is not serving life. Society is tending toward degeneracy and the debasement of what it means to be human.
Society is serving the agents of destruction and violence.
There is a better way. It's up to us to start living it.